Meet Me in the Moon Room Read Online Free PDF

ready to make his mad dash. Craig and his father swung Big Betty—one, two, three. The song tingled through Sam’s body. Craig and his father tossed the pig at the monster’s gaping meatgrinder mouth.
    The pig screamed.
    Sam tossed his hat to the ground and ran.
    Craig dropped to one knee and cupped his hands.
    “She has no bananas today!” Mike sang.
    Sam stepped into Craig’s hands, and Craig heaved. Sam flew. The monster closed her teeth on the pig, and Big Betty’s scream stopped abruptly in a riot of snapping bones and dark blood.
    Sam sailed over the monster’s terrible face and hit her trunk with a splat. He felt himself slipping, and he clawed at her rough bark.
    She must have swallowed the pig or spat it out, because she roared again, and her trunk swayed from side to side as if a hot desert storm had raged up the mountain to blow through Escotilla. Sam scrambled up her trunk for the bunched fruit. Her arms, he knew, could only reach so far.
    Maybe far enough. Something scratched down the back of his jeans and snatched at his boots. He looked down and saw her pale white hands, strangely delicate with their long white fingers, clawing for a hold. He climbed out of range.
    She stretched up her arms, like sinewy vines, as far as she could, but she couldn’t reach him. She shuddered, then quieted and pulled her arms back down. Sam hoisted himself up to her bananas.
    There were two bunches, one to the left and one to the right. Like ears, he thought. Little black flies swarmed around the fruit. Sam stretched out one arm and grabbed a banana, and the monster trembled. He pulled but the banana wouldn’t break loose. He glanced down and around at the townsfolk. Everyone was silent, watching him, waiting, he thought, for him to make a mistake and fall. Crazy Sam Briggs.
    “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He jerked at the banana, once, twice, and it came away in his hand. She groaned. Where the banana had been attached, bright red blood gathered and fell in slow drops to the dusty street below.
    Sam inched his way up under the hanging fruit until he could wedge himself in, freeing his arms and hands to open his prize. The stem still bled a little, and he bent it to one side. The rind split along the top, and he tugged it away from the fruit inside. More like pulling the skin from a chicken. Inside, the fruit was gray with pale purple veins running through it.
    Sam tossed the skin away and raised the warm flesh of her banana to his lips. He closed his eyes and bit and felt her hot blood fill his mouth. Memory leaped up behind his head and banged his face into the tree. He fell into his childhood, into the icy summer flash flood waters roaring down Mad Dog Creek. Sammy, swept along with the red manzanita branches and broken trees of the oak and pine forest, washed ashore by the Witch’s cottage, where it had never been before. The cottage must have moved there during the night on those big chicken legs. You never knew where you’d find it.
    “It does so have chicken legs! You just can’t always see them.”
    “Baloney,” said Lila. And Sammy and Mike and Craig grinned and elbowed one another as the Witch’s daughter turned her bright brown eyes up at them.
    Julie!
    She was so pretty in her satiny black dress, her hair long and blacker than a wet crow’s wings, her skin so white, a miniature woman, a porcelain doll with a crooked grin. Julie put her hand on her mouth and wiped the smile from her face and looked at Lila. She made claws of her tiny white hands and wiggled her fingers. “Bibbity bobbity boo, Lila.” The blood drained from Lila’s face and she took a step back, then another, stumbled, and fell on her butt. What a hoot.
    What shall we do, Julie? Let’s shake ‘em up. What shall we do?
    The Terrible Five.
    Who TPs the trees? We do!
    Who soaps the windows? We do!
    Who runs the town ragged?
    Who is it? Who is it? The Pharmacist’s boy. The Pig Farmer’s kid. And that Mike who toots his own horn.